Monday, April 22, 2013

Chitralekha Basu thanks The
Book Review for reviewing Sketches
by Hootum the Owl by Kaliprasanna
Sinha in their Aprilissue.

'Calcutta by nature is a city so multifarious and so intractable that it spills over the brim of any work of literary or artistic endeavour to seize it' says Basu. According to her no literary work can be more representative of Calcutta than Kaliprasanna's 150 year sketch.

‘It was indeed heartening to see a work of translation about
social life in mid-19th century Calcutta, an area of so-called niche
interest, given considerable space in your esteemed publication.

…Indeed, Sketches by
Hootum is a ‘tiny sliver of the city’s cosmos’ as the reviewer suggests.’

The complexities of displacement have
created massive, mixed flows: refugees, asylum seekers, illegal immigrants,
IDPS and other victims of violence, deprivation, hunger.Persecution and
discrimination occur together , and the old forms of protection are often
inadequate.

This book considers the disparity
between economic growth and human development indices that leads to continuous
massive human flows.

Paula Banerjee

Paula Banerjeeis professor, department of South and Southeast Asian Studies,
University of Calcutta and president, Mahanirvan Calcutta Research Group.

Editors and contributors grapple with the dialectical nature
of culture, ‘particularly how its dichotomies become most evident’ and offer
lively discussions on literature, on songs and singers, theatre and actors,
art, sexualities, Naxalite women, Tebhaga, school textbooks, covering most aspects
of life and living.

Kavita Panjabi

Kavita Panjabi, Professor, Department of Comparative
Literature, Jadavpur University and Paromita Chakravarti, Reader, Department
of English, and Joint director, School of

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Independent Publishers and the Interactions of Regional Language
Publishers

‘It is a truism that small independent publishers bring
sparkle and fresh quality to Indian publishing. I would argue that because these companies are run by
publishing professionals, as opposed to being family run, they offer very high
quality editorial and production skills, publishing most of the best books in
India. These small companies focus mostly on social science and literary
studies...What independent
companies focus on is the creation of knowledge, that is, something that adds
to the world’s understanding of ideas, of life, of how and why people live
their lives, in brief, the great humanities, social sciences, natural sciences,
philosophy. This kind of publishing feeds into perennial thought.

So what do independents not publish? They avoid the
stereotypical and are not impressed by the need to entertain and get more
sales. When are sales enough to impress a multinational? Andre Schiffrin in his
books: The Business of Books and Words and Money says that a small
quality imprint brought by a conglomerate can never succeed even when it
increases sales. Because the target is always pushed further. Unrealistic
expenses like huge fancy corporate offices and salaries have to be covered…

The kind of publishing that Indian independent publishers do
is to show what is happening in society, whether in fiction or in non-fiction.
They, thus, take risks in publishing a first time author who has something
important to say, again, whether in fiction or non-fiction. This is because
they want to publish exciting, quality books.’

An Extract fromIndependent Publishers and the Interactions
of Regional Language Publishers by Mandira Sen